Clondalkin Flexible Packaging

Referentstory SIMATIC IT Preactor

Clondalkin Flexible Packaging is an international producer of high value packaging for food, confectionery, beverage, tobacco, dairy and home & personal care products. The packaging company is flexible using different techniques like extruding, printing, slitting, die-cutting, waxing, laminating and many more. The wrap around your six-pack of beer, a flower sleeve, wrappers around your candy, inner liner in your cigarette box or the lid on your cup of yoghurt are just a few examples. The company produces these packaging materials in 11 factories in the United States, United Kingdom, the Netherlands, Germany and Switzerland, realizing a total net sales of 400 million Euro’s per year with about 1400 FTE.

Clondalkin Flexible Packaging runs an ERP system to streamline their business processes but, there were some specific requirements for production planning. The company was looking for a solution to address these demands. This search led to Evologics – partner in production planning – and the implementation of the planning tool Preactor.

‘With Preactor we have direct visibility of our planning’

Michaël Ben-Yosseph, Business Manager at Clondalkin Flexible Packaging, assists the Directors of Clondalkin in executing the business strategy. In this role he is also responsible for all IT and the centralized IT team, that manages the ERP system (Infor) that Clondalkin runs.

Ben-Yosseph: “At the moment not all companies are on the same ERP system, but the goal is that they will be at one stage. It’s a great system, but the one shortfall for us was in planning. Our production order process is complex. What you usually have is: a sales order generates a production order with multiple steps. However within our work process: a sales order generates multiple production orders which could have links with each other but don’t necessarily have to. If we are planning – for example – extrusion, printing and cutting/slitting, we have 3 separate orders for those 3 steps. If you move one of those orders in time, you don’t immediately see the knock on effect it has on another order. This can cause issues, because if you put the print order in front of the extrusion order, you have an impossible planning request. We wanted to create a better and more direct insight into these specific planning requirements and we also needed a clear graphical overview of our planning status.”

“We immediately see the bottlenecks in capacity, which allows us to make more effective planning choices. We can immediately confirm if a specific deadline request is possible.”